It seems finally to have dawned on the Clinton administration that the step-by-step Middle East peace process has utterly broken down. In a speech Wednesday to the National Press Club, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced a major change in U.S. Middle East policy: It now favors accelerating “final status” negotiations. As another high administration official conceded, they are giving up on “the incremental logic of gradualism.”
Albright herself will go to the area within weeks to jump-start the process. She will be discussing not this or that interim step, but the core remaining issues dividing Israel and the Palestinians: The nature of the Palestinian entity to be created (a state or something less), its borders, and the fate of Jerusalem.
The shift is clearly related to the terrible suicide bombing in Jerusalem July 30. However, the push for such a change arose four months ago, following the last wave of suicide bombings and street riots in March. Yet for months the administration persisted under the old formula, pushing ahead for more interim “autonomy.”
Autonomy once seemed like a fine idea. It was the basic premise of the Oslo peace accords: As Israel granted the Palestinians more autonomy and territory, trust would develop and psychological barriers would fall, permitting yet more Palestinian autonomy. That virtuous cycle would end up with Israel and the Palestinians achieving a “final status” of peaceful coexistence.
The almost four years since the signing of the Oslo agreements have proved this to be a grotesque illusion. If anything, the younger Palestinians, the ones who have come of age since the “peace process” began, are even more hostile to Israel than their elders.
And no wonder. They are fed by the now-independent Palestinian media, schools, political and religious authorities an unending diet of vitriol and calumny.
The Palestinian representative at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights declares that “Israeli authorities . . . infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus.”
The Deputy Minister of Supplies says that “Israel is distributing food containing material that causes cancer and hormones that harm male virility . . . in order to poison and harm the Palestinian population. We absolutely feel that it is an organized plan and conspiracy under the auspices of the Israel Defense Forces.”
The Palestinian Authority decrees the death penalty for anyone who sells land to Jews–and three land dealers are then murdered.
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The highest religious authority appointed by Arafat declares–in prayer!–Israelis to be “sons of monkeys and pigs,” subhumans that recall the Nazi racial taxonomy.
Rather than produce a virtuous cycle of trust, autonomy has turned into a breeding ground of hate. Frenzied rallies celebrate and honor suicide bombers. Small wonder that a generation of young men volunteer for the honor. The results could be seen bleeding and dying on the streets of Jerusalem last week.
Autonomy has turned out to be a cease-fire in place. And not much of a cease-fire, at that. It has more the character of low-level guerrilla war. Muted and undeclared, of course. Arafat cannot afford to openly tear up Oslo. But his double game is clear. Consider this May 25 interview with a Russian newspaper.
Q. “In your opinion, is Hamas a terrorist organization?”
A. “The Hamas movement is one of many patriotic movements.”
Q. “Even its military wing?”
A. “Even its military wing.”
He is too clever to say it. But his meaning is obvious.
Less cagey is the Palestinian elected council. Just six days after the March suicide bombings (including one in a Tel Aviv cafe), it sent its congratulations to “all the holy martyrs” of the latest “noble wave of opposition.”
Let’s be clear. This guerrilla war is not about Israeli occupation. Ninety-eight percent of all Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza now live under Arafat’s rule. These are tactics in an enormous subterranean struggle underway between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu over the shape and details of a final settlement.
At stake are the borders of Arafat’s future state and Jerusalem. Every bomb, every threat, every riot (like ones Arafat had been orchestrating in Hebron) is pressure. The goal is to see which side has more nerve, more will to hold out against making pre-emptive concessions.
This is what underlies the unending violence and instability. It is not “frustration,” as many in the West fatuously claim. It is strategy.
That is why Albright is calling finally for short-circuiting the process by putting on the table and in the open the issues that Arafat is trying to gain advantage over with proxy violence on the ground.
The United States is finally saying: Cut the violence and start the talks. The final talks.
It’s about time.